Hey, new to reading and I’m hoping to find a book authored by someone who is or has been a special forces person talking about their experiences (SAS, GIGN, SOG, Navy Seals etc.) I will politely decline Jocke Willink, other than that all doors open.
If there are other warfare “must reads” that aren’t necessarily special forces I would love to get suggestions about those too!
by syzeey
3 Comments
*No Easy Day*: *The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden* by Mark Owen.
*13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened in Benghazi* by Mitchell Zuckoff and the Annex Security Team.
Soo I actually do not know of any books by special forces authors, but I do want to slip a non-fiction in through your “warfare must-reads” loophole.
**Nuclear War: A Scenario** by Annie Jacobson was published this past March and I’ve already read it like 4 times. Jacobson is a great well-respected and well-sourced investigative journalist in the military-intelligence space, and is a Pulitzer finalist.
She spent ten years reporting for this book. Other than a short prologue and epilogue, the entire book is a look at the worldwide American nuclear command and control apparatus (and by extension America’s assumptions about other nuclear powers’ protocols) through the imagined scenario of North Korea unexpectedly dropping a nuclear bomb on Washington DC. She doesn’t spend much time on the “why,” though she convincingly argues that the scenario – or one like it – is hardly an impossibility.
She takes you through the first 72 minutes after the ICBM launches from NK (aka as the last 72 minutes of human civilization as we know it), sometimes going second-by-second to describe the technological and human elements that go into detecting and deciphering nuclear threats, how it gets reported up to the president, and all the steps and decisions that must be done perfectly in a very short amount of time in response – and which will, even if executed flawlessly, will still likely lead to nuclear holocaust. I thought the whole book was great, but I was especially astonished by her physical descriptions of exactly what happens inside and around a 1-megaton nuclear bomb (much bigger than Hiroshima, but far from the biggest in existence). Still incomprehensible, but enough scientifically accurate detail to make me realize just how incomprehensible it is.
The epilogue takes place 24,000 years later, presumably when it might be possible for life to begin to come back to some parts of the planet.
Sooo.. not special forces really, but definitely a deeply reported, dramatic and harrowing window into the the men and machines we trust to save us from the “nuclear sword of Damocles.”
Rouge Warrior – Dick Marcinko
About the OG